Senselab | Immediations

Founded by Erin Manning in 2004, the SenseLab at Concordia University was conceived as a laboratory for ‘research creation’ at the nexus of philosophy, art, and activism. My involvement began in 2007 through several international events as part of the series, Technologies of Lived Abstraction – Housing the Body (2007), Society of Molecules (2009), Generating the Impossible (2011). In 2013, the SenseLab secured a multi-year research grant from the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada, for Immediations: Art, Media and Event (2013-2020), a large-scale partnership between 11 universities (14 academic research centers), 17 community partners, 21 co-applicants and 2 independent collaborators, across 3 international hubs (Montreal, Europe, Australia).

My Post-Doctoral fellowship at the SenseLab (2013-2015) was part of this endeavor, where I researched the intersection of relational aesthetics, process philosophy, and collective techniques for co-creation. Collaboration and facilitation with colleagues, and community / industry partners, worked in parallel with my own particular focus on the affective dimensions of planetary urbanism, through the lens of geo-locative interfaces and mobile devices (extending the implications of my Doctoral research at RMIT). These concerns, both collective and individual, resulted in a series of events, workshops, conferences / symposia, academic publications, media art projects and performances, in Montreal, Vancouver, New York, and Mexico City / Puebla.

Ketl

Ketl is a performance collaboration with Canadian media-artist Sans, presented at FOFA Gallery (Montreal) in 2015. The work uses dance, video projection, locative media, text-to-voice translation, face recognition and generative media; to pose a series of questions around how planetary computation affects our sense of self and communication with others (including non-humans). The project overlapped with several other iterations and related works that share similar concerns; including a performance installation at the Affect Theory Conference in Lancaster Pennsylvania (2015), in collaboration with Melora Koepke and Anwar Floyd-Pruitt, and various events around the O’megaVille project (see below).

“Thinking back and forth, feeling what just happened, what things have been and are still becoming, as all these emerge together – there are many modes in which an event seems to shift, as if outside of itself, just as this outside is felt within thought. Events are always in the middle of things, even as this middling seems far-flung for the ‘now’ moment.

Drawing on systems-based and philosophical approaches to affect and situated cognition, I discuss a media performance project called Ketl to consider how media may be seen to open (and withhold) relational processes of collective creation. I want to define media quite broadly, for both this work and its writing—to include physical objects, digital interfaces, site-specific elements, and their modes of description; where it’s not just specific kinds of media, but the speeds and slowness they allow in modulating affective tonalities for bodies and persons. If the immediacy of the event is already a “specious present” that’s blurred and smudged across untimely modes of attention (Varela 2000), then perhaps media do not so much mediate our experience of the world, as enact an ecology of thought that includes human and nonhuman agents.”

Chapter abstract (excerpt); “So Soon Too Late: affective shifts in a Ketl”, in Immediations (Hornblow, 2019)

O'megaVille

O'megaVille was a creative research project at SenseLab, involving a series of workshops, performances, lectures and symposia, using mobile devices and geo-locative media, to explore the notion of ‘planetary urbanism’ as an affective phenomena. The project peers through the lens of Google Street View to explore how living in the city sometimes feels like occupying multiple points in time and space, multilayered and multivalent, ‘always on’.

Workshops, lectures, talks and performances included events in Canada, Mexico, and the USA:
The Festival of Temporary Experiences (Montreal); Movements of Thought, Usine-C (Montreal); Centre Phi (Montreal); Pathway Propositions, Topological Media Lab, Hexagram, Concordia University (Montreal); Darling Foundry and the Encuentro Hemispheric Institute of Politics and Performance (Montreal); International Symposium on Electronic Art (Vancouver); Critically Kinaesthetic: Performing bodies of political engagement, York University (Toronto); The Design Studio for Social Intervention (Boston); Weather Patterns, Glasshouse Gallery (New York); Universidad de las Américas (Puebla, Mexico); Huerto Roma Verde (Mexico City).